If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Possibilities?

As for fonts, I still recommend the Cardo font to my students. It's free, and it has a very complete set of characters of Greek and Hebrew, so you only need to use it alone if you want. (It's also fairly attractive, but characters are a bit wide, and some of the strokes are a bit thin. Still, it is quite functional for both onscreen and in print.) I have seen the SBL Greek beta (preview here), and it is quite nice. Once released, the plan is to also release a SBL Biblical which combines both the Greek and Hebrew.

As for typing polytonic Greek, I liked the Logos Greek keyboard (cf here), but it turns out to not work well at all in Office2007, because it renders so many combined characters rather than pre-composed ones. The best solution I can find (and one that works correctly in the BW editor/notes) is to use Keyman from Tavultesoft and one of the polytonic Greek keyboards. (Keyman costs $19 for the 2 keyboard version.)

This is really funny.
I thought, one of the main reasons to use Unicode it that you do not need a specialized font!
Since you still need specialized fonts, what's the advantage?
This Unicode thing creates more bad than good so far. Remember the websites in Unicode where you are told that it will display correctly only if you use this or that particular font?
Also, where is the tool to write fluently Greek in Unicode? Is there one in BW?

Wieland, the Unicode standard is so large that not all fonts carry every single symbol. So as long as you change your font to one that maintains that particular character, you're fine.

But I don't understand the statement that you don't have a decent Greek unicode font. What's wrong with SIL's Gentium & GentiumAlt? As far as I know they support ancient Greek very well. Is there a reason that it can't ship in Bibleworks? Its under the same open font license that their Hebrew font is.

I could be missing something, but the key non-Unicode function missing in BW7 is the ability to truly use it in the User Notes. You can select unicode Greek, for example, but all accent marks show up as the "?" character.

I have tried it with the "default" Arial Unicode MS (which looks horrible) and with a sophisticated font (Gentium).

Unicode

Originally Posted by wie

This is really funny.
I thought, one of the main reasons to use Unicode it that you do not need a specialized font!
Since you still need specialized fonts, what's the advantage?
This Unicode thing creates more bad than good so far. Remember the websites in Unicode where you are told that it will display correctly only if you use this or that particular font?
Also, where is the tool to write fluently Greek in Unicode? Is there one in BW?

The problem is partly that there is more to the issue than Unicode. The SBL and SIL Hebrew fonts are not just sets of glyphs. There are little programs with each letter (they are Open Type) that position the vowels and accents. This means that all Unicode Hebrew fonts are not the same at all. Up to this point Microsoft has not invested the effort to produce decent Hebrew fonts - because it is a large job for what is to them a small audience. So we are in fact back to the good old days of having to share fonts or point people to the places where they can download them. What Unicode did do is standardize the wrapping of Hebrew, something that never worked in a really sharable way prior to Unicode. But the technology still has a long ways to go for Biblical Studies. BW ships with SBL Hebrew (it wasn't free - we had to pay to join as an SBL font sponsor) but users cannot share the SBL font with others (as far as I know). What they can do is point people to the SBL site where individual users can download them for free. So there is progress, but Windows is still not capable of Biblical Greek and Hebrew out of the box. But the technology to do it is free to individuals from third parties,

What about the keyboard?

Originally Posted by MBushell

I am not sure why it matters whether Unicode is supported in the Browse Window or not. Why does anyone care about that? All they care about is the ability to export texts in the format that they need. Right? Greek and Hebrew are exported in Unicode by default in version 8 and it stays that way unless you change some configuration settings. And it seems to work well. Unless I told you that the internal Greek and Hebrew fonts were non-Hebrew, you really wouldn't have any way of knowing. In other word the program functions the same whether we use Unicode internally of not. Maybe I am wrong, but that is the way I have been looking at it.

Greetings from Greece.

Here at our monastery it would not matter to us if the the internal font is Unicode or not for Greek as long as the text can readily and easily be exported into a Unicode font, like the SBL, for use with the basic Microsoft Greek Polytonic layout. What we do find difficult, as I'm sure anyone who regularly types with a standard Greek keyboard would, is having to imput to the Bibleworks Greek font using the BibleWorks layout. I have not seen BW8 yet -- we are still plugging along with a v5 and a v6, and an occasional a v7 visiting in a laptop -- but it looks like it still doesn't have alternate keyboard layouts for the browser, or even the ability to map one out, for the BW Greek font. Being so accustomed to the standard Greek layout, we constantly make mistakes typing text to the browser. It would be such a blessing to simply be able to use the same keyboard layout for all of our work with BibleWorks, regardless of what is going on under the hood.

Am I correct about BW8, or does it alternate keyboard layouts for the browser? I'm sure such a feature would push us to an upgrade.
If it doesn't, is there some other solution for us?

@kalogeros:
I completely agree with your comments. I find it nearly impossible to type in Greek in the Editor of BW8 because I am not accustomed to its keyboard, especially for applying accents and breathing marks.
If I try to use Unicode Greek by clicking on the little alpha with the circle above it on the Editor button bar, it automatically switches me to Arial Unicode MS (and I can't find any way to switch it so that it uses my preferred Unicode font for Greek, Cardo) and it switches me to the Greek keyboard I've installed under Windows. (And I should note that I am using WinXP. Results may be different under Vista.) When I try to type accents or breathing marks, however, I mainly get question marks. (This seems to be an old problem.)
The polytonic Greek keyboard I use is the one from Logos, but it has some problems... There is no other Windows Polytonic Greek keyboard that is any good that I know of.
The only way I can get results I want is to use Tavultesoft Keyman with the Manual Lopez keyboard. (Found HERE under Classical Greek.)
What this still means is that BW's internal keyboard is not consistent with the keyboard I'd like to use in the editor and in other programs.

completely agree with your comments. I find it nearly impossible to type in Greek in the Editor of BW8 because I am not accustomed to its keyboard, especially for applying accents and breathing marks.

It would be nice if BW could implement the standard Greek keyboard just as they have done with the Israeli keyboard. In fact, I would like to see them ultimately move to use these native keyboards as the default for each language. I know it would take time, but it seems that is the wave of the future with regard to native keyboards anyway.

I have not seen BW8 yet -- we are still plugging along with a v5 and a v6, and an occasional a v7 visiting in a laptop -- but it looks like it still doesn't have alternate keyboard layouts for the browser, or even the ability to map one out, for the BW Greek font.

Kalhmera...

Even though what you desire is not yet implemented in BW8, (although I suspect it very likely will be in the future), the Unicode support is far better in BW8 than in 5 or 6, so the upgrade would probably be beneficial to you even in that regard, not to mention the literally tons of other new features and enhancements between the versions.

Ergo, if it's financially feasible, I would upgrade anyway, and as I said, I am sure that BW is now aware of this enhancement request, so if it's going to be implemented, it will be BW8 that it is implemented in.